So I've just finished RTK 1 a while back, and I thought that I'd take a break of about one week for my reviews to stack up in the last column and then proceed with RTK 2, but I've done a bit of research and an overwhelming majority of people seem to be saying that it isn't really the best thing to read after volume 1, so now I'm confused. The alternatives suggested by many (Kanji Odyssey, c2k-something etc) are things that I've never even heard of and all of it is just going over my head.

I have no prior knowledge in Japanese and picked up RTK volume 1 as an absolute beginner. The only exposure to Japanese I have is a whole lot of anime, visual novels and Light Novels (admittedly all of them with English translations).

In essence, what I'm looking for is a simple explanation of which book/method I should follow after RTK 1, and it would be extremely helpful if suggestions are accompanied by a description of what it actually IS. A one word answer like - "c2k" isn't going to help me much.

P.S - I apologise if there are already threads made about this topic, but I've searched through quite a few of them and I haven't found a simple, concise explanation of what to do next. I'll be very grateful for any assistance regarding this topic, thank you

if you are planning to do Core2 > Core6, then there's no point doing RTK2

There are a lot of choices, and many of them are fine. Have you taken any courses on Japanese? Some grammar work might help. I'd work on listening practice, too. JapanesePod101.com might be appropriate.

I worked through RTK2 a long time ago, and it seemed very useful, but using something like Core2k might be more efficient.

TheAvenger Wrote:I haven't found a simple, concise explanation of what to do next.

A simple, concise explanation:
There is no simple, concise explanation. The reason is simple: the most important things happen in your head, and nobody knows you as well as you yourself do.

You might check this:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/
!0 Japanese What’s to learn BEGIN HERE.doc
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid121590

This forum is a mine of treasures that are hidden is a heap of fluff. One of those treasures is this post: (BROKEN LINK) http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pi...11#p184311

Have a read of the book – it teaches you how you can teach yourself your second language. After you read the book you should know how to use the resources collected by buonaparte.

(Note that SRS is an invention that became popular after Dr Kato published her book so you could include some SRSing as part of your study routine... or not, if that’s not your cup of tea.)

Learning the kanji readings by learning vocabulary and grammer is the most enjoyable way for me as I can actually use the words in day to day life with Japanese. I use Minna no Nihongo books in my Japanese class and a bit of Tae Kim's website since his style is more casual. I also do a bit of the Core 2000/6000 since they are the highest quality example sentences out there. I use Anki to reinforce learning and I always use kanji on the question side. Having the kanji there makes it sort of like a 'fill in the blank' question for the kana reading. Doing it this way means I'm learning the most common ways of reading each kanji earlier.

japaneselevelup.com has a lot of great tips that might help you out; it's like ajatt without all the annoying marketing. Core2k might work for some, but I find it easier to remember words when I typed them into Anki myself; actually, I struggle a lot more now when I started taking sentences from websites and so on. I question the usefullness of core 10k though, because English definitions might not be as precise as definitions should be; I notice that even in more similar languages, and after seeing Norwegian* learners' Lang-8 entries.

Also, I've heard that core6k has a lot of politics related stuff which might not be as interesting to some.

(*my native language)

After RTK1, I worked my way through the Basic Grammar section of Tae Kim's guide (http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar)

Doing this gave me an insight into how a real Japanese sentence is put together, starting from such simple things like "this is a fish", "this was a fish", "this is not a fish", "this was not a fish", and building up from there.

I'm now going through the Core2k anki deck (essentially a list of the most common words) along with working through the Essential Grammar section of Tae Kim's guide. There's a lot of very good info on this in Nukemarine's beginners guide (http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=5110)